


Interstitial

by lunabee34 (Lorraine)



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: F/M, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-03
Updated: 2014-04-03
Packaged: 2018-01-17 23:42:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1406998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lorraine/pseuds/lunabee34
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rodney's always lived in the spaces between.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Interstitial

Rodney has always lived in the spaces between.

He remembers two things from when he was very young. The first is his mother’s face. She is speaking in the memory, but Rodney doesn’t recall her words. His mother’s eyes are blue, that preternatural blue of long-frozen snow, and the rings on her fingers pinch Rodney’s arms where she grips him. She smells like roses, and Rodney mustn’t hug her, mustn’t muss her dress. The second thing Rodney remembers is Jeannie’s tiny face crowned with curls. She is laughing and clutching him with chubby fingers and she is saying Rodney’s name.

This is where Rodney begins: beneath his mother’s notice and idolized by his baby sister. 

Rodney was too young emotionally for college and too gifted intellectually for most of his schooling. He can remember slinking through the hallways of the school as a boy, his head down, his escape trajectory plotted. If Rodney timed his exit just right, he could hit those empty pockets of corridor and be home free before the bell even stopped ringing.

Later, when he’d found his calling, when the beautiful and ordered and strangely terrifying world of astrophysics had claimed him, Rodney found himself yet again immersed in the interstices—in those places beneath and between and alongside what is known, what can be quantified, what can be accomplished.

So Rodney is not surprised in the least that this, whatever he and John have together, occupies that same liminal space.

What Rodney feels for John lives in the moment before the sky blooms with fire, the instant after the rain quells, in the heartbeat between a hiveship winking out on the viewscreen and the sound of John’s voice.

“So long,” John says and, “I mean I’m not saying goodbye,” John says and the whole long years between those two points in time fold like a fan until they overlap because they mean the same things.

Sometimes Rodney is ashamed of himself when he remembers the forty eight hours Teal’c was trapped in Earth’s Gate. Rodney’s bones are identical with those of the man who told Sam Carter very sympathetically that her teammate was as good as dead, but the flesh that has grown up over those bones is vastly different. Rodney’s hands now know what it feels like to take a life so that others might live and Rodney has heard Ronon crying in the night as he detoxes from Wraith enzyme and Rodney’s arms know how to shelter Teyla’s precious child from all harm. Rodney’s shoulder is at home next to John’s. 

What Rodney feels for his team, what he feels for John, is not love but some other emotion, something that cannot be named, something that is beyond the capacity of language to describe. Rodney listens to John breathe in the quiet of the jumper, light from the HUD sharpening John’s cheekbones and whether or not John will ever hold him through the night seems largely irrelevant.

With the Golden Gate Bridge dominating the horizon, Rodney asks Ronon the Satedan word for teammate. “This,” Ronon says, dragging a finger down the ink on his skin, “and this,” Ronon says, pulling Rodney into a crushing hug, “and this,” Ronon says, smacking Rodney lightly upside the head. “This is what we are.” It’s the best definition Rodney has heard so far.

Jennifer smiles a smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes and turns back to the nightscape of San Francisco. “Team,” she says. “The whole damn city is my team,” she says. “You find room in your heart for that.” 

Rodney loves her so much, he aches with it. Of this, he is certain.

That night, Jennifer shows him footage of himself in the final stages of parasite-induced dementia. “I didn’t mean to tape you like this,” she says. “I forgot the camera was rolling.”

Rodney watches himself call for John and call for John and call for John. Jennifer comes and still he calls for John. Teyla comes and Ronon comes and they calm him, but still Rodney calls for John. Rodney is perversely fascinated with this impaired version of himself until he sees a moment on the recording he is certain that Jennifer never meant to show him. On the screen, John rushes to his bedside and for an instant, Jennifer wears such a naked expression of despair and resignation that Rodney hurts to see it. Rodney turns to her in the here and now and realizes this one moment was the entire reason she showed him the video.

“That’s teammate,” she says, her voice nearly breaking.

Rodney stays awake until the sun rises listening to John say, “Hey, buddy.”

Twenty hours later, Atlantis hurtles through hyperspace, John cocooned in the soft glow of the command chair. “We are moving faster than the speed of light on a plane adjacent to normal space,” Rodney thinks, and John opens his eyes, smiles as if he can hear what Rodney is thinking.

“What now?” Rodney says to Jennifer when Atlantis is settled. The water of their new world still roils and hisses beneath the city, each pane of glass fogged over with steam.

Jennifer sits beside him on the bed. “I once watched Dusty Mehra wipe up an unconscious Alison Porter’s vomit for three hours. The whole infirmary full of medical personnel and she’s the one cradling Alison’s head and sponging her down.”

“I love you,” Rodney says quietly.

“I know. I love you too.” Jennifer takes Rodney’s hand, her tiny fingers threading through his. “But I meant what I said back on Earth. I may not have what you and Sheppard and Ronon and Teyla have, but I know what it’s like to hold someone’s life in your hands. I know what it’s like to be responsible. I know what it’s like to have no more room.”

“What are you saying?” 

“I’m saying I would have liked to walk through the Gate with you, Rodney.”

“Oh,” Rodney says, and then they are kissing, sweet and dirty and tinged with regret like all goodbyes.

Later, Rodney waits on the pier and John finds him there. John always finds him. They drink beer and they watch the atmospheric distortions in the sky of this new planet and they don’t talk. They’ve never really needed to.

Rodney thinks that kissing John will be like watching his six—frightening and all-consuming and altogether routine. He’s not wrong.

John leans in like he’s been waiting all his life for Rodney to fist one hand in his uniform and drag him closer. Rodney licks into his mouth and John opens up for him easy as breathing. Rodney catches John’s bottom lip in his teeth and John moans.

In his quarters in the moonlight, Rodney makes love to John. Those aren’t the right words but they’re the only ones he has, the only way he can describe the sweat pooling in John’s collarbone, John’s dog tags sliding over Rodney’s thighs, John’s mouth on Rodney’s throat. 

John is surprisingly loud in bed, his voice guttural and harsh. “Yes,” he pants and “Rodney, God, Rodney.”

This is the subtext of Rodney’s life become text, liminal space crossing the threshold into reality—John’s back arched above him, John’s fingers digging into his hips, John’s pupils blown wide with want.

John falls asleep with his head on Rodney’s shoulder, and Rodney lays awake listening to him breathe. “Here you are,” Rodney thinks before he falls asleep himself, “right where you’ve always been.”


End file.
